READ AN EXCERPT
Excerpt from “Our Song” by Ander Monson
Copyright © 2020 by Ander Monson
Forthcoming in The Gnome Stories, Graywolf Press, February 2020
I no longer believe in memory and don’t believe in fire. I hold my hand to the simulated flame and anticipate the pain. Even though it’s digital it still hurts. It still adds up.
All pain adds up eventually until it breaks you. It wires into the nerves, which triggers the flinch, so when I want to do it again—to thrust my hand into it to remind myself how the unreal feels—I don’t, not yet. I’m not sure I’m up for it. I’m trying to test my response: Is it consistent with the one just a moment ago? It’s fake, but what kind of fake? I want to know. Caribou sees me hesitate and laughs, deservedly so, with the awkward repetition of a loop.
Just because I know it’s not real doesn’t make it not real, doesn’t make it not hurt. Caribou’s not real either. She wouldn’t understand. She’s been my companion for this extended recon, but she’s not here, not exactly. I mean, she’s present, but when I push on the thought I have to admit that she’s not here, not like me. Still, I respond to her like a little twitch. I can see her heartlight give a signal and I find myself blinking back. My heartlight clicks out a message in return. It says I’m glad we’re here together. It says it’s almost time to go home.
There seems to be no way up to the surface from this system. I thought there was, and Caribou said so too; we’d observed all the signs: light seeping into the room through seams where light would not naturally occur, like out of the back of a book on a shelf, for instance, or from a toilet lid, and so she thought that this room could lead us into the upper level where we knew we could exit without blowing up the contract, and that was why we were exploring this set of rooms again.
I for one am getting tired of this subdivision: it’s just a bunch of passages that interlock and churn at the same set of difficult, knotted-up memories. We mapped all of them and double-checked our work, except for this room, hoping that on the first pass we were wrong, that we would find an exit here. It took almost a day. So we’re down to this, or else we have to backtrack even farther.
Here’s the flame again. I know I have to put my hand back in and so I do. Caribou’s mouth goes oo oo oo. I wince and wait for the signal to recede. As if to fill the space where the pain just registered, I laugh at it: doesn’t mean it’s real, I say. It’s not even realistic. See here? You can’t see pixels; the system’s too sophisticated for that, but the flame patterns are preprogrammed. The apparent randomness, the occasional little flare-up, is on one of four overlapping loops. When you’ve worked on fire you know the tricks. We watch and it repeats, a heartbeat. See? I say. Caribou looks at me as if to say what do you mean by real? She holds the look for a second longer than is comfortable. We’re stuck here in this anterior passage, which is a phrase I only believe I comprehend. Underneath? Outside? Interior of an ant? But it’s identified on the work order: anterior passageways B142–171 and connective: workup, map, differentiation, emphasis on error.
About The Book
The Gnome Stories focuses on characters who are loners in the truest sense; who are in the process of recovering from mental, physical, or emotional trauma; and who find solace―or at least a sense of purpose―in peculiar jobs and pursuits.
With The Gnome Stories, Ander Monson presents eleven unforgettable stories about oddly American situations: as surreal as an urban legend and at the same time perfectly mundane.
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Article originally Published in the February/March 2020 Issue “Short Stories”